Perl extension DBD::Firebird version 1.31 is released with quite a few changes if you compare with provious announcement , here are a few from the ChangeLog:

* remove artificial hard-coded limit of 1_000_000 bytes when fetching BLOB data
* add /usr/local to the list of possible firebird homes [RT#123723]
* blob_type needs to be signed to be assigned/compared to -1
* bpb parameter to isc_open_blob2 is a pointer
* drop unused column character set definition
* correctly check for Test::CheckDeps presense
* finish: do not check uninitialised status vector If statement type is isc_info_sql_stmt_exec_procedure,isc_dsql_free_statement is not called and there is no point checking the status vector for errors. An error there may be from a previous call, or just plain garbage.
Fixes Debian bug : 883183 — test failure on i386, and RT#110979
* add support for a ‘timeout=$secs’ parameter [RT#119764]
* put fb_api_ver in XS and make it available to both embedded and regular driver
* more constants for client version (major/minor/full version string)

We are glad to release the new major version of advanced Firebird (2.5 and 3.0) distribution: HQbird 2018. The key new features are the following:

Online initialization of asynchronous replication (in the Enterprise edition). Now it is possible to initialize and re-initialize database replicas with zero downtime of the master server.

Automatic performance monitoring (in all editions), with the performance reports which show the slowest and the most frequent SQL queries, and with the advanced monitoring of long-running active transactions.

Pool of connections for external statements (for version 2.5) which greatly increases the performance of Execute On External statements

Pool of prepared statements (for version 3.0) which greatly improves the performance in case of frequent parametrized queries

New version of Firebird SQL Studio, now with the support of encrypted databases

For those, who downloaded trials of previous HQbird versions: we have reset all previous trial registrations to the end of December 2017.

All registered users of HQbird 2015, HQbird 2016 and HQbird 2017 will receive the free upgrade to HQbird 2018!
For Windows users – it is possible to install HQbird 2018 over the existing installation and keep the configuration.